Meaning of meaning in English

meaning

noun

/ˈmiː.nɪŋ/ us

/ˈmiː.nɪŋ/

meaning noun (OF WORD/WRITING/SIGN, ETC.)

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B1 [ C or U ]

The meaning of something is what it expresses or represents:

The word "flight" has two different meanings: a plane journey, and the act of running away.

The meaning of his gesture was clear.

His novels often have (a) hidden meaning.

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The meaning of a sentence often depends on stress and intonation.
The literal meaning of 'television' is 'seeing from a distance'.
It's sometimes very difficult to draw a clear distinction between the meanings of different words.
Let's just say we had 'problems', if you get my meaning.
The skull at the bottom of the picture has a symbolic meaning - it represents death.

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Meaning & significance

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meaning noun (IMPORTANCE)

B2 [ U ]

importance or value:

The birth of her first grandchild gave new meaning to her life.

Education had no great meaning for him until much later in his life.

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Philosophers have searched for millennia but they haven't found the meaning of life.
Since I started this job, my life has had new meaning.
The work must be productive, to give it some meaning.
These youngsters cannot see the meaning in education.
Wealth has no meaning for them.

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Importance - general words

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Grammar

Nouns

Nouns are one of the four major word classes, along with verbs, adjectives and adverbs. Nouns are the largest word class. …

(Definition of meaning from the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary & Thesaurus © Cambridge University Press)

meaning | American Dictionary

meaning

noun

/ˈmi·nɪŋ/

meaning noun (IMPORTANCE)

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[ U ]

importance or value:

Life had lost its meaning for her.

meaning noun (EXPRESSION)

[ C/U ]

what something represents or expresses:

[ C ] Do you know the meaning of this word?

[ C ] The word has several meanings.

(Definition of meaning from the Cambridge Academic Content Dictionary © Cambridge University Press)

Examples of meaning

meaning

Subjecting "force" and "attraction" to rigorous mathematical treatment does not entail that "force" and "attraction" are transformed into pure mathematical concepts without any physical meaning.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

In such a framework, there would seem to be no reason not to include social meaning along with 'ordinary' semantics and pragmatics.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

We do not simply, through being rational and knowing ordinary language, 'know' the meaning of all necessary moral words.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

These birds do not fly away when free; they (choose to) inhabit the human world, which protects them and gives them human meanings.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

That is, there is a commonality of effect consistent with this region's role in the integration of sound and meaning.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

However, the activation of semantic representations necessary for the retention of meaning will continue to be sustained in the postsentence retention interval.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

Or, adopting a distributed point of view, conceptual representations of verbs may share fewer meaning elements in a bilingual's memory than those of nouns.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

However, the circumstances and psychological meaning surrounding separation from a parent may play as important a role as the fact of the separation itself.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

If they thought both meanings were synonymous, then they were told to choose the meaning that would be the most likely used for the sentence.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

The third group was taught both pronunciation and meaning, providing the full set of lexical constituents.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

Symbolic meanings are constructed through historical traditions, articulated contextually and reproduced only in practice.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

The material world, present or past, is imbued with social structures that people invest with social and symbolic meanings.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

As these groups identified themselves with specific parts of the landscape, particular parts of it took on ritual and symbolic meanings.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

However, the transformation tools support symbolic reasoning, which may be used to explore the meaning of a specification at a much higher level of abstraction.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.

Collocations with meaning

meaning

These are words often used in combination with meaning.

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accepted meaning

Nicholson's starting point is the commonly accepted meaning of the word 'fusion' - the commercial imperative that led jazz to get into bed with rock at the end of the 1960s.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

allegorical meaning

In principle, we may suppose that at one extreme the allegorical meaning is merely top-dressing, an occasional implication sparked by a detail.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

connotative meaning

The results yielded three underlying dimensions of affective/connotative meaning (evaluation, potency, and activity) that accounted for much of the variance in ratings.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

See all collocations with meaning

What is the pronunciation of meaning?

Translations of meaning

in Chinese (Traditional)

符號或字詞, 意思，意義, 含義…

Meaning of meaning in English

meaning noun (OF WORD/WRITING/SIGN, ETC.)

meaning noun (IMPORTANCE)

Grammar

meaning | American Dictionary

meaning noun (IMPORTANCE)

meaning noun (EXPRESSION)

Examples of meaning

Collocations with meaning

meaning

Translations of meaning

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